It seems sort of perverse to use the cool blowup schematic of a Buddha Machine as the wallpaper for my virtual Windows desktop.

It kind of implies that perhaps an Awakened One labors under layers of Mac machination. Or maybe it implies that at the heart of the Windows virtual machine is actually an Awakened One. Or maybe it just looks kind of cool there and serves as a nice contrast to the plain, blue background my Mac desktops have so I can remember that the VM is up and running.

The newest Parallels beta, btw, runs lickety split. Enough so that I killed my Bootcamp partition, which had the added benefit of improving performance overall by giving me back 30 gigs of space for swap. Photoshop was murderating performance by hogging enough space to strangle virtual memory. At least that’s how I read it. And like all good techno-savages, I easily mistake my hand-waving for conjuring.

I’m still not going back to Mail.app, though. mutt is fine, and I learned that BBEdit has a pair of useful switches to bring mutt/the terminal back to the foreground after invoking BBEdit as the mail editor: -w and –resume.

It seemed kind of weird to bail from a terminal-based mail client to a GUI editor for about an hour. Now it seems a lot more natural. The editor serves as a sort of bridge between the mostly usable and pleasant GUI and the shell world. Stuff like TextSoap, which provides a versatile arsenal of text-cleansing actions, is available instead of working out how to do it in a console-based Emacs, which is ultimately more flexible but immediately less well-stocked with recipes.